I'm finding context is important for me. It took me from 1995 to 2007 to tell my therapist my whole PTSD story. Even in therapy sessions I didn't want to say I didn't just get PTSD from 2 sexual assaults by a pedophile as a child. Nor did I want to say I didn't just get PTSD then, too, from only weekly bloody beatings from a homophobic mom for years after that when I told her seeking comfort and help.

I withheld that I had a third source of PTSD, that I had been tortured by the military here in Uruguay, too. It's something we torture survivors who were lucky enough to live through it didn't tell in Uruguay. A brush with the dictators' soldiers brought suspicion not just on us, but on our families and friends. Then once I escaped and came here to the USA, I didn't feel like I deserved as a civilian to talk about PTSD here in the USA when there were so many soldiers in uniform who had PTSD. I honored their service, and I felt unworthy somehow.

So it's taken a lot for me to feel safe enough to talk about it all, including the torture. I finally felt safe enough in 2007 because a VA doctor got ahold of me and convinced me against my reservations that veterans would actually not consider me unworthy like that. So I came here to DS PTSD, and found someone here like me right away, and have been able to open up here since then, too, in a second safe space.

it's been great to be here down in Uruguay, another context. To give everybody a parallel historical point of reference, the dictatorship happened here 45 years ago. So Uruguay now with its bad past would be like Germany in 1990 was about World War II and the Holocaust that ended in 1945. Young people are aware and care about what happened, but it happened not to them or even to their parents, but to their grandparents.

So a young Uruguayan on the staff at my hotel caught me off guard today. She's someone sincere whom I trust, who has been talking to me off and on for the last few days. She's a young mother of 3 and a wife, and in talking about her family she mentioned that her grandmother was tortured under the dictatorship for hiding books the dictator censored. The grandmother got in trouble for keeping a book buried in her back yard that the dictator had mistakenly censored. A book about Picasso's style of "Cubism" in painting was mistaken by soldiers to be about Cuba and politics, so it got her arrested and tortured.

I empathized with her grandmother's suffering. Then the young woman looked me in the eye and asked me, nicely, "were you tortured?"

I would NEVER have allowed someone to ask me that question before DS PTSD and before my therapist in 2007. I would have lied my butt off before answering that one honestly. But today, I swallowed hard, thought of how I have found my voice here in writing, and found my actual speaking voice saying, "yes." Then, as I am her grandmother's age, I told her my own story. And I didn't break down and cry, like I had always feared I would--a reason I had always held back. It felt good to speak up a little.

Thanks for supporting me here in talking about all of my PTSD trauma sources, and not just certain ones. And thank you for supporting me in this trip, and seeing it as another step in my recovery, like my therapy and my time invested in DS PTSD has been. Today was another step for me indeed. I'm grateful for your support that helped make it happen.